«As part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2018, ŻAK | BRANICKA is proud to host the first solo exhibition of Tomek Baran, marking this as the begining of the cooperation between the artist and the gallery.

Tomek Baran (born 1985 in Stalowa Wola, Poland) works to challenge our sense of materiality. His objects can’t be defined by a single discipline but by a combination of painting and sculpture, that creates a playful displacement of both. Perhaps the most accurate definition would be that they are ready-mades that often evoke a postindustrial mood. Baran uses a mix of different materials to create a performance-like space, where the objects work together forming their own interventions by their placement. His painting surfaces vary from shiny metallic to a concrete matt, pulling the viewer’s eye to interact with the shaped constructions under the canvas. He focuses on problems of space and actively looks for the relation between his own abstract practice and that of architecture and sculpture. Growing up in Stalowa Wola, an industrial city in post communist Poland, Baran’s keen aesthetical sense was thirsty for something different. He chose not to create something new out of noble materials but instead to repurpose what was familiar.

His paintings and installations undoubtedly work through intuition. The artist places his bets on the viewer’s sensitivity and emotional involvement, as well as his/her “computer” immersion. The natural and artificial lighting, the shadows and shadings working together with the picture objects, undergo constant change depending on the angle and place from which a work is viewed. The avant-garde artists said that movement and light destroy static realism in painting. In Baran’s work, movement and light conspire with the abstract forms, becoming inseparable components in viewing his work. The artist also uses the notion of the “gradient,” or movement in computer graphics, the fluid tonal transitions between colors. It is significant that Baran calls himself an “abstract hooligan”. His work is a subversive game, he takes an ironic stance toward his own work, perceived as a place of art and non-art, painting and non-painting, surrounding reality and virtual reality. If this is so, the artist seems in fact to be questioning the traditional idea of the abstract as utterly divorced from reality. By taking a closer look at the monochromatic pictures it will not seem that they contain direct references to Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, but rather to the symbolism of the “black mirror” in the popular British series of the same title, where it is the screen of a smartphone, tablet, or computer, reflecting our reality in virtual reality. Baran’s object pictures seen as “black mirrors,” looking glasses that are matte and covered with various paints, reflect what we see, giving the impression of being on the other side – or rather in the picture. This heterotopia, whose ultimate experience is the mirror reflection, displays a “counter-place,” an irreal space in which we can see ourselves where we’re not. The experience of entering the picture thus equals the experience of a place without a place, in other words – a virtual reality.